Federal political office in Canada has been monopolized by two parties, the Liberals and Conservatives (officially the Progressive Conservatives after 1942), although minority parties have been consistently represented in Parliament.

The Two Major Parties. The continued preeminence of these two parties is attributable to the fact that they alone have maintained a sufficiently pragmatic approach to policy-making to attract wide support from the diverse regional, economic, language, and religious groups that make up Canadian society.

Subsequently, as new issues arose in French-English relations, the Conservatives made decisions that reinforced and deepened French-Canadian antipathy toward them, producing repeated electoral defeats for the Conservatives in federal elections in Quebec. The Liberals initially capitalized on the Conservative party's problems in Quebec by choosing-in 1887-the extremely able Francophone Sir Wilfrid Laurier as their leader. Under Laurier, who led them for 30 years, they developed an approach to Quebec that helped them to avoid the kinds of mistakes that were to become so damaging to the Conservatives. Thereafter the presence in their parliamentary caucus of a large bloc of Francophones kept them well attuned to political currents...